BENTHAMISM IN THE COUNTRYSIDE - THE ARCHITECTURE OF RURAL SPACE, 1900-1930

Historians of state formation have increasingly recognized what Foucau lt has described as the 'dark side' of the enlightenment institutional principles of representation, transparency and accountability and exp lored the parallel principles of legitimation, surveillance and discip line. In this paper, I pursue these themes in a neglected area, the in stitutional architecture of rural space. I do so by examining ideologi es of rural planning in western Canada and the American midwest in the early twentieth century. These ideologies were linked to state projec ts, and found institutional expression in Canada in the 'town planning movement' attached to municipal and provincial planning offices, and in the United States in agricultural extension services and the 'count y agent' system-the local 'inspectorate' of the Federal Department of Agriculture. The aim was a restructuring of rural space in the interes ts of rationalizing agricultural production and controlling large popu lations of settlers, recently displaced, and disturbingly 'isolated' a nd inaccessible in the vast spaces of the great plains, Despite common aims, American and Canadian reformers adopted fundamentally different principles of spatial design. Town planners inherited the European as sumption that community networks and class relations were embedded in particular spatial arrangements, so that rural reform required re-draw ing the boundaries of fields and settlements, As early as 1915, Americ an reformers developed the idea that networks of sociability and domin ation were defined first by abstract structures, formal organizations and the cash nexus, and could, using modern media of communication, be 'disembedded' from particular locales and distributed spatially.